Hardwood is a minimal-dependency Java library for reading Parquet files. It currently has row-reader and columnar-reader APIs, with Parquet writing planned for the future. Gunnar Morling, Hardwood’s author, published some initial benchmarks in the v1.0 announcement, comparing Hardwood’s row and column readers against Parquet Java . Those benchmarks measured read speed against already-downloaded Parquet files.  Gunnar’s benchmarks ran on an m7i.2xlarge, with 8 vCPUs / 4 physical cores....

0.0 Context Setting Monday, 29 June 2026 in Portland, Oregon, where the U.S. Supreme Court is definitely asserting its supremacy and I have belatedly realized that the Not A War On Iran is perhaps the first war that has business hours, i.e. it only runs when the stock markets are closed? One thing that caught my attention this time. Hey, did you know I do consulting ? I totally do consulting and I bet some of you know people who need my help. 1.0 Things That Caught My Attention 1.1...

Jeff Mabry recently joined Shield AI as Head of V-BAT. We caught up with Jeff to discuss V-BAT’s operational success, Shield AI’s focus on safety, and the growing global demand for the aircraft.   Can you introduce yourself and tell us a bit about your background?   I grew up as a military brat and attended the U.S. Air Force Academy because I wanted to be an Air Force pilot. I spent a rewarding 21 years in the Air Force, first as a Combat Rescue helicopter pilot with mu...

June has been a busy month—113 links below for your enjoyment and delectation. I’m going to share one extra link up here with you though, but it’s not my fault if it wrecks your productivity! My friend Kris Jenkins has written this devishly simple but addictive browser-based game: Escape the Moon . June has been a busy month—113 links below for your enjoyment and delectation. I’m going to share one extra link up here with you though, but it’s not my fault if it wrec...

I was a guest on James 's Wonders of Web Weaving podcast and it was such a lovely conversation. We talked about old teenage blogs, how I found the IndieWeb community, why I think now is the best time to be your full weird self online, and I accidentally held myself publicly accountable for a side project. This was also my first podcast ever, so I was a little bit nervous at the start. Besides my recent MC experience , I don't often do unscripted things, so there's always a small fear in th...

Announcement before we begin: I’m excited to welcome PierSight  as a returning sponsor of my  independent space writing for another year!  🌙 Ahmedabad-based PierSight is building a constellation of SAR satellites equipped with AIS sensors for persistent, all-weather ocean studies and monitoring. With $8 million raised  in funds, and being co-selected to build India’s first public-private Earth observation constellation, PierSight is targeting a Q1 2027 launch for its first com...

📷 Olympus OM-20, Zuiko 200mm f /4 🎞️ Ilford HP5+ pushed to ISO 1600 📷 Olympus OM-20, Zuiko 200mm f /4 🎞️ Ilford HP5+ pushed to ISO 1600 📷 Olympus OM-20, Zuiko 200mm f /4 🎞️ Ilford HP5+ pushed to ISO 1600 f

“Landing of Spanish Colonists in the Port of Algiers” by Pierre Emile Gigoux de Grandpre, via Invaluable . Welcome to the reading list, a weekly roundup of news and links related to buildings, infrastructure and industrial technology. This week we look at Trump refusing to sign a housing bill, the high cost of US-made doors, slow trucking, why we stopped making new land, and more. Roughly 2/3rds of the reading list is paywalled, so for full access become a paid subscriber. Housing The ROAD ...

Our 2 hens have finished sitting on the Guinea fowl eggs - out of 10, we managed to hatch 5 of them. The chicken eggs we have in the incubator won't be ready for another week or so. Excited to see how many of them we get. Thanks for reading this post via RSS. RSS is ace, and so are you. ❤️ You can reply to this post by email , or leave a comment . Our 2 hens have fi...

Programming note; this is the 150th issue of NULL BITMAP, and NULL BITMAP will be going on a hiatus for a while, maybe just for the Summer, maybe indefinitely. I think I need a bit of a break from it and I don't think the weekly cadence is serving me like it once did. I have been poking around the Jujutsu repo recently, and I was very pleased to realize that this thing has a whole query language and query planner baked inside of it. This was expected, I guess, if you spent five seconds inter...

The cells of animals, plants, and fungi start their lives by being torn apart. Cells are born by division, and just before a parent cell becomes two daughters, it doubles its nuclear DNA and carefully condenses it into X-shaped chromosomes. The nucleus disassembles, letting these crucial genetic instructions float free in the cell’s soupy interior. Then the cell performs an astounding… Source The cells of animals, plants, and fungi start their lives by being torn apart. Cells are born by ...

As digital work routines become more prevalent, workers are adopting new forms of microbreak entertainment. Social casino platforms are increasingly visible as a downtime choice, offering brief, engaging experiences with familiar gaming mechanics. This development reflects changes in how workers approach relaxation and productivity in the contemporary workplace. In many modern work environments, the need for effective short breaks has prompted employees to explore digital option...

I’m reviewing two books here with their origins in the mid-1970s microcomputer revolution: David Pogue ‘s Apple – The First 50 Years Ben Zotto ‘s Go Computer Now – How Sphere Invented the Modern Microcomputer – Then Disappeared These two companies – Apple and Sphere – started at around the same time with similar products. Yet the two corporate histories are quite a contrast. Apple is a wild success, becoming one of the largest companies on the planet. Spher...

I stopped tracking books using apps or services, even though there are good ones out there. I have two little shelves in my bedroom, on the left I put books I want to read, on the right the ones I have read. The plan was to empty the one on the right halfway through the year and post a picture here on the site to remember what I have read. This is that picture, and those are the books I have read so far in 2026. All the 28 books I have read, in the order I read them A lot of Terzani, a lot o...

Peter Brass is a prior NSF theory director. He has written an intelligent guest post on the new NSF guidelines that we present here. You have received many mails regarding the proposed OMB Uniform Guidance for federal grant making. It is a very long document. So far the OMB has received more than 32,000 comments, which nominally all will be read and taken into account, but actually most are general comments along the lines of “this will destroy scientific research,” and unspecific com...

Recently I was reviewing some shell script a colleague had written: if grep -e ' @[^@]\+@ ' " $DIR /install.sh " ; then I thought the \ before the + was a mistake, and also pointed out that if + was to be used we’d probably need to pass -E for extended regular expression (ERE) support. The colleague replied that \+ in a basic regular expression (BRE) was the same as + in ERE (one or more repetitions). This was news to me! I wanted to know more, so I turned to the FreeBSD ...

An earlier draft of this post was called Xen. I’ve been using Linux hypervisors too much again . I like my AeroPress a lot. No, scratch that, I love my AeroPress. I adore it. It’s been one of the best, most consequential pieces of kit I’ve ever had the pleasure of owning. I’ve been using the same one for more than twelve years, and have only ever needed to swap the rubber gasket out once . This funky little gadget has made me thousands of cups of coffee, and made me have thoughts ab...

Today I turn 45 which is, if you think about it, half of 90! And also about 30 years older than I feel on the inside! What is age? What is time? What is reality? I certainly don’t know. Current situation:  Pretty flowers Goobie says No journal ONLY PET. Monday 22 June: Study anatomy! Work! Lily to therapy! Go to the gym! Eat dinner! Study some more! Fall into bed thinking about tissues and bones! Tuesday 23 J...

Authors: Lequn Wang , J iangwei Pan , and Linas Baltrunas Figure 1. Autoregressive homepage generation. GenPage builds a Netflix homepage one row or entity at a time, each one conditioned on what’s already on the page and the user’s context. Introduction The Netflix homepage is the first thing users see when they open the app and the primary way they discover content to enjoy. Almost every part of it is personalized, including which rows appear, which entities show up within those rows, ...

For the past 3 years, AI evals have been my professional focus. 1 The most common objection I hear to evals is “our product is hard to eval”. This objection is a product smell. Artifacts that are hard for you to verify are often hard for users too. In the worst case, users have to redo the work from scratch to verify the output. More importantly, designing your product for ease of verification should come before building evals. In this post, I’ll walk through three products I advised ...

tl;dr; The pls package on PyPI is an abandoned Python version (last released as v6.0.0 in 2023). The actively-developed pls was rewritten in Rust and now lives at pls-rs/pls . If you installed it with uv tool install pls or pipx install pls , you have the wrong one. Uninstall it and install the Rust build instead (e.g. brew install pls-rs/pls/pls ). You may have heard me sing the praises of pls . I really love the icons and colors to disambiguate files and provide more informati...

Would you like to have some real impact on the tech industry? Do you have $100,000 to spend? If you answered “yes” to both questions, ask software engineering researchers (the kinds of people who participated in It Will Never Work in Theory ) to design a study that companies could run internally to measure the impact that genAI adoption by programmers is having on business outcomes. Spend $50K to get expert reviews from both practitioners and (other) researchers, publish all of the proposal...

The Space Shuttle's five 1 general-purpose computers played a critical role in each flight: controlling the engines, monitoring thousands of sensors, displaying data to the astronauts, and navigating the Shuttle. Each computer consisted of two 60-pound aluminum-alloy boxes: the box on the right is the CPU, a 32-bit processor that executed 420,000 instructions per second. These computers were designed before microprocessors became popular, so the processor was built from multiple boards crammed ...